Since computer users have first been able to communicate with one another through a telecommunication connection between their computers, there has been a growing desire to utilize computers and telecommunication systems for social interaction with others. While e-mail provided one-to-one communication, with the advent of early dial-in bulletin board systems (BBS) in the early 1980s, computer users discovered the joy of being able to communicate with many other users at once. Most of the early BBSs were either dedicated to particular interests, or were used by groups of friends or other types of socially connected individuals.
In recent years, the popularity of the Word Wide Web (WWW) coupled with incredible growth in availability and accessibility of high bandwidth Internet connections resulted in an unprecedented proliferation of “on-line communities.” These phenomena include, but are not limited to, chat-rooms, on-line forums, groups, clubs, and digital photograph-sharing websites. In particular, on-line “portals” that provided WWW users with a variety of services (e.g., searching, news, free-email, etc.) immediately recognized the great value of hosting (i.e., providing storage resources and administration tools to) such communities. The more time the users spent using the communities, the greater their exposure to the hosting portal's advertising and other offered fee-based services.
As a natural extension of the concept of on-line communities there have been many efforts to translate the benefits of multiple-interest groups of users into advantageous business models or to otherwise utilize them for business purposes. These efforts typically took several different approaches: (1) websites for digital image sharing and management, (2) on-line merchant systems utilizing user-feedback for making product or service recommendations based on feedback received from other users with similar interests (also known as collaborative filtering), (3) systems that facilitate on-line and real-world social activities, such as event-planning and contact management websites; and (4) dating websites which attempt to match users to one another using a number of different techniques.
However, all of the above approaches suffer from a number of disadvantages that prevented their implementations from gaining more than a casual popularity:                1) Most of them were add-ons to, and/or functioned separately from, the on-line communities while those functions that were integrated into the community systems did not provide sophisticated features (e.g., robust and full-featured contact management, event planning and others were separate systems from the on-line community systems that had basic photo albums, calendars, and member contact lists);        2) The users had to learn how each system worked and had to keep track of what they did with which system (e.g., one website used for automatic contact management, another for photo sharing, and a third one for on-line social activity);        3) For the community or related service to grow, new users had to be attracted through advertising or more often by invitation from existing users; and        4) Most importantly, all of the approaches required the users to make significant efforts to take advantage of their features, with a greater desired quantity and quality level of features requiring a greater effort on the part of the user (e.g., to get movie recommendations, the user had to rate many movies themselves, or had to identify his friends as contacts for a contact management and/or event planning website).        
The fourth disadvantage noted above has been the greatest barrier to further evolution of on-line communities and related services/functions. It is well known that the attention span of an average on-line user is tiny. In fact, the very reason that the portals are constantly developing new services and features, is to keep the users on their websites as long as possible. Accordingly, providing the information to a system to take advantage of its features often took more effort that most users were willing to put in, and the users either ignored the service or feature, or more often gave up before all necessary information was provided, and then disparaged the “poor quality” of the feature. Also the growth of virtually all communities (aside from Adult-oriented ones) has been relatively slow as most new users are added by existing uses having to make a significant effort to invite others. Even though, in the last few years, new developments in the online communities called “social networks” have solved at least some of the above disadvantages, the key challenge of lack of desire by users to make efforts to contribute to system functionality, remains unanswered.
It would thus be desirable to provide a system and method for automatically generating, maintaining, and growing a multi-function on-line social network. It would also be desired to provide a system and method for implementing beneficial functionality, for an on-line social network, that automatically increases in scope and quality based on data implicitly derived from routine utilization of the network by the users without requiring additional efforts form the users. It would further be desirable to provide a self-expanding dynamic infrastructure for an on-line social network that automatically increases the number of features available to the users based on the user's continued utilization of the network.